My Thoughts on Story 013 – “The Web Planet”

I just spent the last ten hours in a car driving across the better part of five states. I’m hungry, I’m tired, I’m cranky, and I’m stuck having to review this piece-of-crap story. So with that happy, balanced view in mind, let’s get started.

Oh, piss off, already.

As you might have gathered, I’m not a fan. This was not a good story. This wasn’t even an acceptable story. It wasn’t even a, “so bad it’s good story”. This was just a bad story from start to finish, and even worse, it committed the unforgivable sin of not being even remotely entertaining.

It’s hard to see how this story got made. The overall concept wasn’t terrible, and I rather liked some of the ambition that was on display here. But the writing was off, the pacing was terrible, and it had no business being six parts. Even three would be pushing it for the level of content.

The problems are multiple. The costumes look bad, the sets look bad, and the adversary characters, as well as the sympathetic characters are not at all strong. This is made worse by the fight scenes that take place in near total silence, with unspeaking characters fighting unspeaking characters.

There was some good, obviously, to the pre-production version of this story. As I said, the ambition on display is impressive. But the finished product is just utterly awful and should never have been made.

How much did I dislike this story? Enough that even though half the next one exists only in reconstructed form, I am utterly looking forward to it.